Learn how to get a US bank account for Amazon payments using Wise. Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) is an international currency transfer company that allows you to send and receive money all over the world. Their multi-currency accounts provide an excellent solution for authors from outside the US to receive their royalty payments.
How to get a US bank account for Amazon payments?
Previously, we used Payoneer for our royalty payments from Amazon and Apple. They had a strong system, and everything worked very well. However, in May 2022 they introduced new fees of 1% per transaction, with a minimum of $1 USD.
Amazon pays separately for all its territories and that means each month we receive at least 10 individual payments, some large and some very small. This means we can be paying up to $10USD in fees each month to receive our Amazon royalties.
Wise does not charge a fee for payments through their global currency accounts and as such, they have now become our recommended provider for authors looking to get a US bank account for Amazon payments.
Who needs a payment solution like Wise?
If your bank account is in one of the following countries, you will get paid monthly via EFT from Amazon and Apple Books. If you are in one of these countries, you probably won’t need to use Wise.
- United States
- United Kingdom
- European Union countries
- Canada
- Japan
- India (some Amazon territories)
But if your bank account is in one of these countries listed below, your option for payment is a wire transfer. This takes longer to receive and involves fees and often currency conversion, both at the Amazon and bank end. Not the best solution.
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Brazil
- India (the other Amazon territories)
- All other countries
Note that if you use an aggregator service such as Draft2Digital, they will pay you into your bank account. So that is another way to solve the issue.
Does Wise work for everyone?
Wise is not available in all countries. You can check on their website to see if your country is able set up a Wise Business account: https://wise.com/au/business/
How will we use Wise?
Here at Old Mate Media we will use Wise with both KDP and Apple Books. The benefits of this will be the fee saving of a minimum of 1% of our royalty payments.
Then we can withdraw these funds to our Australian bank account when we need them.
I recommend Wise as a solution for any Australian or New Zealand based authors. The currency account system makes payment processes much easier. And $0 fees saves authors significant money over the long term.
Where To Next?
I hope that this has proven useful and will help authors outside of Amazon’s bank friendly countries to essentially get paid faster. This is just one of our many indie author guides, so do check out the full collection. Of course, the best way to stay in touch with our latest guides, is to sign up to our author newsletter. And you can find us on all the major social platforms, so do come say hi on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
We were fortunate enough to have a Canadian bank account when we first started self-publishing, which meant we only had to navigate the IRS withholding tax, but this question is one which comes up quite a lot for many Australian self-published authors. It would be nice in the future if Amazon itself came up with a solution to this. Thanks for the article. I'll be referring any questions I get back to this from now on.